The Origins and Definition of the Concept of Projection
Painting by Angel Alonso, 2019
When I learned about the concept of “projection“ “in college, I was astounded.
Many seemingly irrational behaviors of others — and myself — made sense.
This is a concept that should be taught in junior high school when psychological awareness first starts, and should be required for folks to understand before they became married and for politicians before they took office.
sparker
“Projection means the expulsion of a subjective content into an object; it is the opposite of introjection… The subject gets rid of painful, incompatible contents by projecting them.”
Psychological Types
Collected Works 6
Paragraph 783]
C.G., on Borrowing “Projection” from Freud
To: Fritz Meerwein
M.D. Psychiatric Clinic, Friedmatt, Basel
29 June 1956
Dear Colleague,
Permit me, in memory of our meeting and your kind letter, to ask you a question which is still occupying my mind
As a psychiatrist, you are doubtless familiar with the phenomenon that can be paraphrased by the New Testament metaphor of the mote in one’s brother’s eye and the beam in one’s own.
The term “projection” used for this, which I borrowed from Freud, has often been criticized in existentialist circles, but I have never understood what is wrong with it.
It seems to me to designate quite correctly the illusion and unconscious assumption by which I ascribe to my fellow man what largely belongs to myself.
I lodge it in him, so to speak
Since you also take exception to my concept of projection, I should be very grateful if you would kindly explain the true state of affairs.
What sort of term do you use for it?
Or do you deny the existence of this process altogether?
For me it is simply a question of a more or less suitable designation for a group of empirical facts and not a philosophical problem, as it apparently is for the existentialists.
One such philosopher asked me in all seriousness what would happen if all projections were withdrawn.
Curiously enough he was dumbfounded when I replied that one would then have a better chance of recognizing reality.
What sort of answer did he expect and what was it that flummoxed him?
I grope as though in the dark and would be much obliged to you for enlightenment
Freud Elucidates his Concept of Projection
[Freud borrowed the word projection from neurology, where it referred to the inherent capacity of neurons to transmit stimuli from one level of the nervous system to another (e.g., the retina “projects” to the occipital cortex, where raw sensory input is rendered into visual images)]
Both of the two sets of feelings (the affectionate and the hostile), which, as we have good reason to believe, exist towards the dead person, seek to take effect at the time of the bereavement, as mourning and as satisfaction.
There is bound to be a conflict between these two contrary feelings; and, since one of the two, the hostility, is wholly or for the greater part unconscious, the outcome of the conflict cannot be to subtract, as it were, the feeling with the lesser intensity from that with the greater and to establish the remainder in consciousness – as occurs, for instance, when one forgives a slight that one has received from someone of whom one is fond.
The process is dealt with instead by the special psychical mechanism known in psycho-analysis, as I have said, by the name of ‘projection’.
The hostility, of which the survivors know nothing and moreover wish to know nothing, is ejected from internal perception into the external world, and thus detached from them and pushed on to someone else.
It is no longer true that they are rejoicing to be rid of the dead man; on the contrary, they are mourning for him; but, strange to say, he has turned into a wicked demon ready to gloat over their misfortunes and eager to kill them.
It then becomes necessary for them, the survivors, to defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are relieved of pressure from within, but have only exchanged it for oppression from without.
It is, however, safe to assume that that tendency will be intensified when projection promises to bring with it the advantage of mental relief.
Such an advantage may be expected with certainty where a conflict has arisen between different impulses all of which are striving towards omnipotence – for they clearly cannot all become omnipotent.
The pathological process in paranoia in fact makes use of the mechanism of projection in order to deal with mental conflicts of this kind.
The typical case of such a conflict is one between the two members of a pair of opposites – the case of an ambivalent attitude, which we have examined in detail as it appears in someone mourning the death of a loved relative.
This kind of case must seem particularly likely to provide a motive for the creation of projections.
Totem and Taboo, 1913
and the Biblical reference…
